Accenture gets into the cloud with $400m investment

Accenture is having a busy year. CivSourcepreviously reported on a strategic acquisition that allowed the company to expand its federal and defense business lines. Now, the company is working on a significant investment to build out its cloud services offering. The Accenture Cloud Platform is focused on managing hybrid cloud environments. Hybrid clouds are cloud platforms common to government, with some technology managed in-house and others offsite.

The offering comes as the public sector works to consolidate data centers, upgrade legacy systems and align themselves with “Cloud First” mandates. Accenture will invest more than $400 million in cloud technologies, capabilities and training by 2015 to focus on delivering what it calls the “right” cloud services from its network of providers, as well as blending its own industry solutions and innovations with third-party offerings.

This type of service menu is becoming more common among what were previously called ‘systems integrators’ before the advent of cloud services, and have since been re-styled as ‘cloud brokers,’ to reflect changes in industry jargon if not technology.

As part of its overall investment, Accenture has created expanded services on the platform, including public and virtual private cloud infrastructure, data decommissioning, software systems testing and big data analytics solutions in the cloud. The expanded service catalog allows government agencies to choose a pre-packaged, standardized format, resulting in faster implementation and lower costs.